Why is SEO – search engine optimisation – important for making your story travel and growing your audience?

If we imagine three most common ways people find our content as three doors, search will be the largest one. This is the door through which new audiences find and explore your stories.

SEO: Algorithms vs Mindset

Every day, we ask Google and other search engines billions of questions. Google alone processes over 8.5 billion searches per day.

As humans, it is natural for us to ask questions. If your story is newsworthy and contributes value to ongoing public conversations, it means that people – your potential audience – will search for it.

As a content creator, your responsibility is to make it easier for people and search algorithms to find your story. The most crucial aspect here is your mindset.

Consider the questions people might ask about your story even before you begin writing it. Which keywords would they use? Put yourself in their shoes: what questions would you ask? How would you search for your story on Google? Once you have those questions, try to address them in your article or video. Search algorithms – and ultimately people – will appreciate that.

Trust, relevance and authority

In our tailor-made and face-to-face workshops and online courses, we go through all sorts of optimisation techniques and best practices. Most importantly though, we are focusing on how to improve trust with search engines and gain authority for your website.

Trust, relevance, and authority are the three pillars that enable your digital content to reach a wider audience and achieve higher rankings.

There are many others, of course, and we address those too, but if you master these three, you will have more knowledge than most of your competitors in the market.

Below, we provide some bonus tips on incorporating keywords into your site, how to rank for answer results in Google, and suggestions on how to gain authority for your website.

If you want to see for yourself the difference that the Lovinfilm PRO’s experts, who are all former BBC journalists and editors, can have on your company’s SEO and digital storytelling, feel free to get in touch.

How to incorporate keywords in your site:

-Title tags: one of the best places for keywords

-Product names (this will help your product/services show up for related searches)

-Product descriptions

-Blog posts (great for pointing information seekers to the right products)

Ranking for answer results in Google:

-Try to use the full question in your titles and headings

-Break your content into sub groups using appropriate headings

-Use bullet points (with keywords)

-Include images

-Repeat keywords throughout the text

Gaining authority:

The more popular your website is, the more authoritative it is.

-Acquiring links to your site from relevant and reputable sources

-Topical relevance : the more relevant a site’s topic is to yours, the more trust you will have in the subject matter of your site

-Negative links: lots of negative links can harm your site, avoid getting links for the sake of authority. One great link will pass more trust and authority than 50 low quality links.